


Golden Dream

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Watersports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 05:47:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17136134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: I like to see you a little more fat.





	Golden Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MillicentCordelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MillicentCordelia/gifts).



> For MillicentCordelia! Merry Christmas!  
> The quote in the summary comes from the song, Honey White, by Morphine.  
> This story takes place in season five, based upon something I read about Jim working for Barbara as a waitress in a cocktail bar. It takes place within the continuity of my story, "Can't Get Blue Monday Out of My Head", but it's not necessary to have read that story for this to make sense.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. This story and the work it's based on are fiction. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

It’s that old movie again. Of all of the gin joints in all of the world.  
It’s not Jim’s gin joint.  
And where else in the world would either he or Oswald be, but Gotham? Gotham’s fallen off of the side of the world, and whether by design or due to inertia, they’ve fallen with it. What’s in it for Oswald is plain to see. He’s still got his claws in the city. It’s not even bitterly that Jim thinks that. It’s just a fact.  
Barbara found Jim on the street, bleeding from a wound to the head, a bullet hole in his gut. He’d managed to drag himself to safety, no one, it transpired, caring enough to follow the blood trail and finish him off. He didn’t know why he’d bothered. This time, there was no Lee around to save his life. He could feel it leaving him, creaking out with every bruising hiss of breath. He started to wish that it would hurry up and happen. His vision dissolving into blackness, Barbara stood over him, a silent film starlet in her last close up before the picture ends. The wind blew through her hair, now shorn, a cap of platinum above her foxy face. She was wearing fur, a coat of sable and ermine. Her eyes were the same as they’d always been.  
He heard himself say her name.  
She must have liked the way it sounded, because she didn’t shoot him dead, out of antipathy or even pity, but had her friends carry him home. When he awoke, foggy and bandaged, she told him that he was going to work off his debt to her. They were the only two in the room. He said, Fine. As she walked out of the room, he thanked her. When he’s pouring drinks, he thinks constantly of Harvey. Everywhere he’s been, Harvey’s been there before him. Everything he’s done, Harvey’s done it before him. Is Harvey looking for him? Jim doesn’t know. Harvey may as well not exist.  
It’s Harvey Jim’s thinking of when Oswald walks in, flanked by Victor Zsasz and Headhunter, followed by that skittish accountant and a few others. Then, Jim thinks: Bag of bones. That’s how Jim always thought of Oswald. Sure, Oswald was skinny, but it was really Jim’s joke with himself: by rights, Oswald should have been a bag of bones, waterlogged bones in the remains of his suit at the bottom of the river. The joke won’t really work anymore, because Oswald’s not the hollow-cheeked apparition he once was. Nothing about him suggests death, now. Not his own death, anyway. If his face is rounder, now, his body wider in his long black coat, he cuts no less striking a figure. Of course he does. Everyone else is so thin.  
Oswald and Barbara greet each other in the too-sweet way that suggests genuine hatred. Jim turns around to dig out the absinthe for some lady’s Corpse-reviver, and when he looks again, they’re gone, eclipsed by Oswald’s retinue and the club’s crowd.  
Jim can’t tell if he’s relieved.  
He’s not, he realizes, later, sitting on a stool at the bar after closing time, wending his way through one of the bottles of whiskey Barbara lets him have. It’s even his brand. Barbara must have remembered. When he’s sober, it annoys him. The rest of the time, he just tries not to think about how it makes him feel. The club’s empty. Mostly empty. A couple of off-duty thugs of Barbara’s are playing cards in a corner under the emergency light. Some of the ubiquitous junkies, looking to trade information or fence property or beg for charity, are scattered around the place in various states of impairment or illness. Other than them, it’s just Jim. The only light in the place aside from those in back near the elevators comes in through the big window behind the bar. It’s just moonlight, these days, starlight, aside from the odd sweep of the searchlight of one of Oswald’s helicopters.  
He’s not relieved.  
He’s disappointed.  
That’s a funny thing.  
He’ll have to try to figure out why.  
Maybe later.  
“Jim.”  
Later.  
“Somehow, I knew you’d land on your feet,” Oswald says, smiling, a shark’s smile, set incongruously in his soft face, chuckling slightly, “but I must confess: this is the last place I expected to see you.”  
“It’s a pretty strange place for you to be, too,” Jim says around his glass. He takes a long drink.  
“Not at all. Business, like life, persists, in even the most unpleasant circumstances.”  
“So, you and Barbara are in business together?”  
“I wouldn’t go that far. As always, when you get down to it, she’s not unreasonable. We have an understanding.”  
“Good for you,” Jim says, because he can’t think of anything else.  
“You must have some sort of understanding with her, too. Otherwise, I can’t imagine why she’s allowed you to live, let alone prosper.”  
“Prosper,” Jim says, laughing to himself, because it’s funny. “The only one who seems to be prospering around here is you, Oswald.”  
“I have done well for myself,” Oswald says, with that tone of false humility that Jim’s always found grating, “In my way, I’ve also tried to help those less fortunate.”  
“Maybe one day, they’ll name something after you.”  
“While you seem destined to sink into obscurity. Well, Jim, it’s been fun, but my business with Barbara has concluded, and I’d really like to return to civilization.”  
“If you could call it that,” Jim says, taking a drink, “Treating a few rotten blocks like it’s your own little kingdom, killing anyone who gets in your way, charging people an arm and a leg for the right to not starve to death or be executed isn’t what I’d call civilized.”  
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to provoke me. Call it what you’d like, but the fact is that I could blow your brains out right here, and Barbara would be miffed for the all of ten minutes it took to throw you away and mop the floor. You used to be somebody, and now you’re nobody. You’re nothing. Toodle-loo.”  
There’s nothing to do but watch Oswald walk away. The limp no longer suggests frailty, not the way that it used to. Leaning on his stick, Oswald has the air of something that’s more dangerous because it’s wounded.  
So, Jim does the only thing left to do after that. Tonight, at least, he has a reason to drink. He did something to himself, leaving him with a persistent ache in his side that’s more acute than what he’s resigned himself to. It will sometimes catch him unaware, and steal his breath. For moments at a time, it’s like drowning. Last week, Barbara found the doctor stealing from her, and in a grand and self-defeating show of power, against the doctor’s sobbed protestations of innocence, shot the woman dead where she stood. No one in this place can work a thermometer, let alone tell him if he has cause for concern, or if his body’s just decrepit and complaining from constant abuse. The only drugs around belong to the junkies, of uncertain provenance and concentration, and upon examination, Jim realizes that he’s not interested in the possibility of dying like that. The alcohol doesn’t do much, he’s forced to admit. He’ll just have to try harder. He drinks until he passes out behind the bar, and stays out until it’s time to chew some aspirin and drink some coffee and get the bar ready to open. When he wakes, his abdominal muscles scream “Good morning”, echoing through his shoulders, his back and his hips. It’s something else to get used to.  
Day in. Day out.

He doesn’t see Oswald again for-- well, it could be weeks, or it could be months. No one really looks at calendars anymore. There’s still frost on the window behind the bar in the morning, so it must not yet be spring. One day, he’ll go down to the street. He’ll take a deep breath. Walk around the block. Do something so utterly normal that it’ll shock the lingering death out of him, and he’ll live again. That’s what this is. Death. He’s dead, because he can’t remember what it was to be alive.  
Here comes Oswald again, with Victor and everyone else. Victor grins at Jim. Headhunter winks. They must be desperate for entertainment. Then, it’s just like the other night. It’s like every night. Every night is every other night. Oswald doesn’t come back into the bar until after they’ve closed down. The same women are even playing cards. The same woman’s nodding in a booth. The same woman has her head on a table. The same woman’s idly running her hands up and down her arms, picking at scabs. If Jim waits long enough, she’ll come up to him and ask him for a napkin, like she did the last time. Death is a dream that keeps repeating. You don’t remember what it was to be awake. Watching Oswald approach, Jim sips his drink.  
“Have we fallen into a rut?” Oswald asks, frowning mockingly, the pouches of flesh at the corners of his mouth pulled downward. His mouth looks fuller, too; his lips pinker, almost red. Obscene, Jim thinks, with neither disgust nor interest.  
“I don’t know what you mean,” Jim says, because he’s drunk enough to have to think about what people are saying.  
“I guess that was unfair,” Oswald says, “It’s not your fault, after all. Barbara told me about how she found you, left for dead. She said that her doctor told her that there was permanent damage to your brain. I always fall for the stupid ones, don’t I?”  
It’s a shock. It’s such a shock that it isn’t a shock, at all. Of course, Jim knew. The whole point was that he knew. It was why Oswald allowed any of it to happen. A reasonable person would not have taken the fall for Jim and gone to Arkham. Oswald had not been reasonable.  
It’s just so strange to hear it said aloud. In the present tense.  
It’s scary.  
Within the fur of inebriation, Jim is fucking scared. As long as it was true, Oswald would never have said anything, nor would Jim. It was Oswald’s to guard, and in letting him guard it, Jim had power over Oswald.  
It’s over. The world really did end.  
All of which must be known to Oswald, everything Jim’s thinking and feeling, every second of the past five years, because Oswald says.  
Oswald says:  
“And yet.”  
Fuck it. He’s drunk. And there’s no one around but a couple of drunk stick-up artists, and junkies who barely remember their own names.  
And him.  
And Oswald.  
And Jim is so goddamn drunk.  
Fucking Barbara should have left him to trickle his life out into the fucking gutter.  
Softly, Jim says:  
“And yet?”  
Oswald smiles. Cupid’s bow mouth splitting into a vampire’s grin. Small, sharp pearls set in a red velvet cushion. “Having sunk as low as you have, Jim Gordon, I want to drag you up out of yourself. Isn’t that strange?”  
This isn’t what Jim wants.  
Let’s just make sure that we understand that.  
You understand, don’t you?  
Understand?  
When he touches Oswald’s cheek, Jim is just… fucking dazzled. His head feels like it was twisted off and put back on askew. Everything Jim didn’t want in there spilled out, and he’s empty and sparkling.  
“Just so that we understand each other,” Oswald says, his mouth drawing into a pucker, “I’m not offering you anything. Whatever happens, I put you right back where I found you before the sheets are cool.”  
“Fine.” Some of the old grit creeps back into his voice. He can’t recall the last time he sounded like himself. For that, alone, he could kiss Oswald.  
So, he does.  
Presses their lips together, tight and dry like clenched fingers for the moment before Oswald opens his mouth, and Jim opens his against Oswald’s. He runs his hand up the back of Oswald’s head, through hair stiff with pomade.  
Oswald pulls away. His pale eyes are full of light. A clapping laugh. “And, now, Jim Gordon, I have you.”  
Jim’s not sure that he wants himself, so he supposes that Oswald is welcome to him.  
“Let’s get out of here,” Oswald hisses, looking around with a disgusted expression.  
Jim reaches back, for the bottle.  
Outside, it’s snowing. A fine flurry like a broth. Tiny flakes that veil but don’t obscure, and sting Jim’s cheeks and bare throat and hands. The world’s the same, but it’s different. It’s wretchedly different. How Jim hates it. He takes a long drink from the bottle, then throws it, almost empty, anyway, into the street. The sound it makes is the only sound in the world.  
“Come on,” Oswald says, peevish but gentle, handling Jim into the back of his car.  
As soon as the chauffeur’s closed the door, Jim kisses Oswald. They sort of rock back and forth until Jim resolves himself, reclines into the corner of the seat, and pulls Oswald on top of him. Frowning, Oswald breathes out, a pinched and annoyed sound. In their leather gloves, Oswald’s hands make a puckering roar against the leather upholstery as he repositions himself. It’s the sound of the sea. Jim strokes his cheek, fiddles with his shirt collar and his tie. It’s unexpectedly difficult. Oswald yanks away his tie, unbuttons the top button of his shirt. Beneath his collar, Oswald smells like soap, cologne. The rich and nameless scent of luxury. His skin is slightly rough at the end of the day. There’s a dash of dark red near his Adam’s apple. He must have cut himself shaving that morning. Jim kisses it. Sucks. Needles it with the barest edges of his teeth. It may be his imagination, but Jim tastes salt and metal. He licks, a long, hard brush of his tongue. Oswald kisses him again, hard. Worries at his lower lip. Ducks down his head, and kisses Jim’s throat, pushing back his chin. He bites. Jim moans from the shock. Moans again because it feels good to do it. Stupidly, clumsily, puts his arms around Oswald, and holds him there, breathing heavily, just to feel Oswald against him.  
Then.  
They’re at the house.  
The chauffeur opens the door, and they walk in through the garage. The hallways are dimly-lit; light that doesn’t extend past an aura and shadows that run from floor to ceiling. The chauffeur’s fallen away. In a corridor, a maid disappears behind an open door. Jim sees her black skirt and stockinged leg, the flash of her white apron, as she dashes out of sight. The door closes with the sound of a cough. At the end of another corridor are two immense doors of dark wood set in ridges of the same. Oswald opens the doors. The first thing Jim sees is the bed. It’s wide enough for five, its black sheets pulled drum-tight. Behind it is a massive carved wooden headboard that stops short of the ceiling. Jim’s seen it someplace before.  
“Saint Vitus’ cathedral,” Oswald says, “Their altarpiece. They weren’t using it anymore.”  
At either side of the bed stands a woman in black uniform, staring straight ahead. One holds a tray with a bottle of champagne on ice and two glasses. The other, a tray with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, the familiar label on the bottle incongruous in this unfamiliar place. Jim looks at Oswald.  
“I didn’t know what sort of mood you’d be in,” Oswald says softly, taking off his gloves and looking at them, passing them through his hands, sounding-  
Sounding.  
Jim sees, just for a second, in his mind’s eye, the image of Oswald clinking together two champagne glasses.  
Where did he see that?  
“Both,” Jim says.  
“Please set down your trays, ladies,” Oswald says. They do. He thanks them, and tells them to go. They do. Behind them, the door shuts with a sigh.  
Jim kisses Oswald. He kisses his mouth. He kisses his neck. He kisses the cut on his throat, now smeared with a trace of rusty red.  
All of him.  
Jim just realized that he wants all of Oswald.  
Oswald lets Jim take off his coat, then his jacket, his vest. Under Jim’s hands, his body rises and falls. Mechanically, with his breath. Geographically, in curves and plains. His arms and shoulders are hard with tension beneath the padding of flesh. He’s broad, across. Broad everywhere, now, with a slight indentation to his waist, where Jim rests his hands. Below that, the fullness of his belly, the soft flesh that surrounds.  
“Like what you see?” Oswald sneers.  
“You look good,” Jim says.  
“Shut the fuck up,” Oswald laughs, head falling back, showing his crooked lower teeth, showing the cushion of flesh beneath his chin, showing the nick to his throat and the hollow below it, the collar of a white undershirt. It’s an easy motion, one Jim’s never seen before, and it thrills him. Thrills him through drunkenness, down to whatever is still living and breathing.  
“I mean it,” Jim says, moves his hands down, feeling Oswald’s body beneath his clothes. Up again, over the rise of Oswald’s chest. He undoes a button of Oswald’s shirt. Fits his mouth into the place above Oswald’s collarbone. Another button. Slips his hand inside, under the suspender above and places his hand over Oswald’s heart. Rubs the material of his undershirt against his skin. Oswald slips his suspenders off of his shoulders. Jim undoes the rest of the buttons. In his white undershirt, Oswald reminds Jim of Harvey. He puts his arms around Oswald, because it feels good to do it. It feels good to touch him through his undershirt, and then underneath it, a warm, solid body that doesn’t feel like death at all. He kisses Oswald’s mouth, gets him out of his undershirt, runs his hands down his body, kisses him again.  
“You belong to me. You’re going to do whatever I want,” Oswald says.  
“Yes.” Jim says it because it’s true.  
“If I wanted to, I could kill you.”  
Jim’s afraid, but not for his life. He’s afraid, and it’s good. What he fears, he doesn’t know, but he understands that it’s vitally important that he keep touching Oswald.  
“Yes,” Jim repeats, because it’s still true.  
You fear the cold.  
You fear it without even thinking.  
You fear it because it means that something’s wrong.  
Human life is warm.  
The absence of warmth alarms. It disgusts. It makes you sad.  
Oswald’s hand around his throat. It’s so very warm. Jim leans into it, the pressure of Oswald’s fingers. His heat. Oswald looks at him for what seems like a very long time, Jim looking back, only breathing, only feeling Oswald.  
Oswald withdraws his hand.  
“I’m going to piss in your mouth,” Oswald says.  
“What? Right now?”  
Oswald is silent for a moment. He smiles. “Yeah. Right now.”  
Jim kneels. Even drunk, his entire body complains. His side clenches like an injured eye. Reflexively, he clutches his hand to it. Tomorrow, he’ll be in agony. Slowly, he lets his hand fall. Oswald’s navel is at eye-level, a dark pucker in a pad of pale flesh. He waits for what’s coming to him.  
Oswald’s hands at the front of his pants.  
He undoes his pants.  
He takes out his cock.  
Jim closes his eyes as he opens his mouth. It seems like the thing to do. A hot stream, ending in a bitter trickle that makes him think of the blood seeping out of his body when Barbara found him. Before he can tell himself not to, he swallows.  
Oswald laughs, giddily. Jim opens his eyes. “I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”  
“You told me I would,” Jim says, because it’s what happened.  
He leans on Oswald as Oswald leans on him as they work to get Jim to his feet again.  
“Yes,” Oswald says, “I did say that. Did you enjoy it?”  
Oswald’s pants are still open. Jim slips his hand inside. Touches. Feels the dampness on Oswald’s underwear. “I don’t think I felt any way about it in particular.” He doesn’t move his hand. He is, he realizes, waiting for Oswald to tell him what to do next. It makes him feel settled in a way that he can’t recall ever feeling before. Like this, he’s safe. There is, no matter what Oswald decides to do him, a strange kind of rightness to it.  
Oswald’s eyes slip shut. He opens them. “I suppose I owe it to you to let you wash out your mouth.” Gently, he takes Jim’s hand away, pours him a drink. Champagne. Fitting. Jim throws it back, and holds out his empty glass.  
“You’re going to get sick,” Oswald says, but refills it, anyway.  
This time, Jim sips, watches Oswald drink, too.  
“Show me where it hurts,” Oswald says.  
It takes Jim a moment to realize that Oswald’s talking about the bullet wound. He drinks the rest of the champagne in the glass, and sets it on the tray. Oswald helps him unbutton his shirt, then to take off his undershirt. Oswald touches the wound. Puts his hand over it. “I have almost the same one,” Oswald says conversationally, frames Jim’s wound with his hands. Jim then recalls that he’d noticed something there, but forgotten it almost immediately. He looks again. The wound seizes the flesh around it, twists it out of shape. In the most basic sense, it’s ugly. “Speaking of stupid, Edward Nygma shot me.” Oswald points to his shoulder. “That’s from Tabitha.” Faded, almost smooth. He points to his side. “Butch just clipped me, once, the night I threw Fish off of the roof.”  
Jim waves his hand over the center of his belly. “Sofia. She shot me four times. I only lived because Lee stopped the bleeding.”  
“I guess we’re even, on that account.”  
Before he can say anything, Oswald kisses him. It’s hard and nasty, and Oswald’s undoing his pants. Piercing the border of drunkenness. Jim sucks his tongue, holds onto him. Moves against Oswald’s hand when he feels it.  
They’re on the bed. The sheets are soft and cool against Jim’s bare skin, Oswald’s full weight atop him, pressing in where Oswald can’t support himself, shedding heat. Oswald pulls down Jim’s pants, gets his underwear down around his hips, touches Jim as he kisses him. It hasn’t been this good in such a long time. Under the curtain of alcohol, he feels it, can say it to himself. Fucking himself in Oswald’s hand, holding onto Oswald. When Jim comes, Oswald says his name. It sounds good when he says it, like this. It sounds the way it used to.  
Jim looks up at him. Pulls him down. Kisses him. “What do you want?” he asks.  
“Take off your pants,” he says, “Take everything off.”  
He does. When he looks again, the brace is off of Oswald’s leg, and Oswald is sitting at the edge of the bed, his hand on his knee, watching Jim. Without being asked, he kneels, takes off Oswald’s shoes. As he stands, he holds his hand to his side. Sitting on the bed, Oswald moves aside Jim’s hand, kisses the wound. Kisses it as though it were a mouth, pressing down with his lips, probing with his tongue, his hands on Jim’s hips, holding him there. Jim lays his hand against the back of Oswald’s head, feels the movements of his head. He helps Oswald up, takes off his pants, his underwear. Kneels again to take off his socks. Up again with his hand on his side. The wound is still wet with Oswald’s saliva.  
“Fish did all of this,” Oswald says, sitting, looking down at his legs. “I can’t even remember exactly where she hit me anymore. Everything hurts, all the time,” he says indifferently.  
“Does it hurt now?”  
“I said that it hurts all the time, didn’t I?”  
“Is it bad?” Jim asks, going to the bottle of whiskey, pouring a drink. The smell hits him in the guts, but before he can think better of it, he downs his drink. Maybe that’s the last one for tonight.  
“I can’t tell anymore. It’s something to remember her by, at least.”  
“Lie back,” Jim tells him. It takes all of his attention to bring himself down on top of Oswald, to make them both comfortable. The whiskey pushes away the pain in his side, and his belly, and his lower back, and everywhere else, so that Jim is just out of its reach. It’ll come back, but not for a while. He kisses Oswald’s mouth, his neck. Kisses him everywhere. Moves his hands over Oswald’s body. Feels Oswald move with him. Spreads Oswald’s legs, hands lingering on the interior curves of his fat thighs, electric violet stretchmarks and black hairs against white skin. Kisses him there, for the shock of competing textures, for Oswald’s softness, his warmth. Goes down on him. Jim has to take his time, because he’s drunk, and he’s stupid.  
Yeah. That’s why.  
He might even convince himself that he’s never done this before.  
He jerks Oswald off for a while, watches Oswald while he’s doing it. People always look like they’re in pain when you’re getting them off. Of course, Jim’s seen Oswald in pain before. Put them side by side. Line up the images forever. Can you tell the difference? Maybe you can’t anymore. Either way. Jim can’t get enough.  
Maybe he never could tell the difference, in the first place.  
Maybe it was always leading here, by degrees.  
Jim thinks of the junkies at the club. The new ones don’t shoot up. It’s something they have to work up to, a taste at a time.  
He stays where he is, waiting. Watching his hand on Oswald’s cock. Oswald’s cock moving in his hand, pale red like a healing wound, leaking like a wound that isn’t healing. Oswald comes on Jim’s chin, his neck. If Oswald asks him if he liked it, he’s not going to lie this time. He wipes his face with his hand. Licks his fingers, then wipes them on the sheets. Oswald makes a sound something like a moan and a laugh. He kisses Oswald, rests his head on Oswald’s shoulder. Closes his eyes. Feels Oswald wrap his arms around him.  
From someplace far away as he’s falling asleep, he hears Oswald say, “When I wake up, I’m going to fuck you in the ass.” He says it as though recounting a fond memory. It’s already happened, you see. It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again, and it’ll happen again because they already know.  
They’re going to like it. They’re going to have a good time together.  
In this, at least, there’s a future. There’s life of some kind.  
It was what Jim wanted, after all.


End file.
